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Planning the first release of KDE Telepathy

Given the various blog posts, and (somewhat unnecessary) hysteria over the news of Skype I felt like I should give an update on what’s going on in KDE Telepathy.

Pace over the past 5 months has been ace, we’ve got a lot done, and as mentioned by a few people already – we’re releasing “soon”! We don’t have a fixed date, but instead we will release when a set list of outstanding bugs are fixed. Probably about 4 weeks time. (unless I die of stress organising it all in the meantime)

What’s in this release?

There’s not as much as we’d like, but we’re making a concious effort to ship something that really works. You should be able to create any type of IM account and have basic contact-list tasks and have normal text chats.

At this stage nothing is really fixed, and we’re in early stages of shaping where we’re going. Hopefully you’ll see what we’re aiming for with KDE Telepathy and a start to the realisation of some of what telepathy is about.

This first release won’t have all the nepomuk integration blogged about by George Goldberg, nor will it have audio/video chat. Rest assured that there are a lot of cool designs, ideas and even code floating around and that this will come, but only when it’s ready.

There’s still plenty of opportunity to get involved, we’ve got some junior jobs left that need doing. Testers are great, providing they’re really willing to read a lot documentation and really get stuck in, there’s quite a bit of effort needed in getting a working setup at present.

What else is coming?

We have a GSOC student that I’m mentoring over the summer to really nail bringing instant messaging into the core of the Plasma Workspace. I won’t spoil the details as he’ll be blogging soon, only to say it’s an exciting time to be in KDE.